“There it is,” Olivia said, her forehead pressed against the passenger window.
The lake was a sheet of cold pewter, wider and darker than I remembered from my childhood summers. Along the shoreline, the grand stone houses of the newer residents rose like small fortresses, their manicured lawns sloping down to private docks.
At the end of the lane, my father’s small yellow cottage stood beneath two towering sugar maples, its paint peeling in long, dry curls.
The front porch sagged toward the driveway, the wooden steps leaning at a noticeable five-degree angle that made my chest tighten. A local contractor had already given me a two thousand dollar estimate for porch repairs, a sum that might as well have been a million.
